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Oz Points the Way

In Australia’s November 24th general election, which I wrote about in this week’s Comment, the Green Party did rather well. It got 7.7 per cent of the vote. By comparison, the Presidential candidate of America’s Green Party in 2000, Ralph Nader, got about 2.7 per cent.

For the past seven years, Americans (and the world) have been suffering from the head-pounding hangover of that 2.7 per cent: President George W. Bush. Even though a clear majority of us—51 per cent—wanted a left-of-center government, we got, with the help of a little nudge from the Supreme Court, a very, very right-of-center one.

In Australia, the consequence was precisely the opposite. The Labor Party, Australia’s equivalent of the Democrats,was the first choice of about 43 per cent of voters. But because Australia has preference voting—what we call instant runoff voting—the Green Party’s voters helped float Labor over the top rather than torpedoing it to the bottom. Once the second and third choices of the Greens and other minor-party voters were counted, Labor ended up with about 54 per cent—43 per cent enthusiastic supporters, 11 per cent grudging ones.

Not being saddled with a government that most of them actively don’t want isn’t the only advantage Australians derive from this arrangement. The Green Party didn’t win any seats in the Australian House of Representatives, but the new Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, knows that a significant part of his winning margin came from being the Greens’ second choice. That’s a big reason that he hastened to sign the Kyoto Protocol. “This is the first official act of the new Australian government, demonstrating my government’s commitment to tackling climate change,” he said last Monday, just hours after he was officially sworn in. (The Greens actually did win a few seats in the Australian Senate, whose members are chosen by proportional representation, not from single-member districts.)

The most interesting member of Rudd’s cabinet is another byproduct. The new environment minister, Peter Garrett, is a household name in Australia, and fairly well known elsewhere, as the lead singer of Midnight Oil, a hard-rock band that enjoyed a three-decade run beginning in 1975. Garrett first dipped his toe into electoral politics in 1984, when he ran for the Australian senate as a member of the (now defunct) Nuclear Disarmament Party. He lost only because Labor, worried about looking too soft (and too anti-American), channelled its second preferences away from him. Twenty years later, all was forgiven, Labor welcomed Garrett into its ranks with open arms, and he won a House seat for them. Now Australia has a charismatic (if somewhat gaffe-prone) environment minister who might never have run for anything if it hadn’t been for the openness of his country’s electoral system.

In the United States, instant runoff voting has been bubbling under the surface, down where the grass roots grow. Last month, Aspen, Colorado, and Sarasota, Florida, became the latest jurisdictions to adopt it. On a larger scale—in House and Senate elections, for example—it would be an excellent way to open our system to a wider range of views, while simultaneously ensuring that winners will have at least the acquiescence of a majority.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.